Push to expand job training is great. But pushing higher education for prisoners would mean even more progress.

President Donald Trump signing the FIRST STEP Act into law Friday marks a turning point in criminal justice reform that’s been years in the making. Still, as the law's name suggests, the effort to reform our criminal justice system is not over.

We believe Congress has an opportunity to build upon the new, bipartisan consensus on evidence-based criminal justice reforms by moving to secure a long-sought goal among reformers: repealing the ban on Pell Grants for people in prison.

In recent years, state and federal legislators have made headway in enacting policy reforms that are intended to address barriers to reentry outside prisons’ walls. Those evidence-based reforms are contributing to the decline in recidivism rates that the U.S. has seen in state prisons over the past decade or so.

Unfortunately, less attention has been paid to obstacles people face while in prison, but the FIRST STEP Act’s expansion of job training and other programs intended to reduce recidivism rates changes that, opening the door to larger reforms like reinstating Pell Grants for people in prison.

Higher education yields results

As heads of the Michigan and Pennsylvania departments of corrections that participate in the Second Chance Pell Experimental Sites Initiative, which lifted the Pell ban for a select number of sites, we’ve seen firsthand the power postsecondary education in prison has to change lives.

We’ve watched people who have cycled in and out of prison become immersed in textbooks and seen people who carry a deep shame from the stigma of incarceration gain a sense of self-respect and confidence for the first time in their lives.

The power of this transformation is borne out in data. For example, a seminal study released by the RAND Corporation in 2013 revealed that when people in prison received some form of correctional education, such as postsecondary courses, they were 43 percent less likely to reoffend than their peers who did not.

In addition to finding a new sense of meaning in their lives, one of the explanations for why more educated people are less likely to commit additional crimes after release from prison is simple: Obtaining a postsecondary degree in a job market where it’s a virtual requirement increases the likelihood a person will secure a job. And people who have jobs are far less likely to turn to crime.

It follows then that expanding access to postsecondary education in prison will not only increase economic opportunity for people leaving prison, but also increase public safety by reducing crime. (Other studies have even found prisons with postsecondary or vocational programming have lower amounts of violent incidents as well, which is critically important to the well-being of our staff.)

In turn, reduced recidivism rates also help cash strapped states cut costs.

To be sure, states have their own roles to play in expanding access to postsecondary education in prison, too. Far too many, including our own, have additional statutory bans on financial assistance for people behind bars who are too poor to afford tuition. In fact, were it not for Second Chance Pell, a state like Pennsylvania would likely have no postsecondary programming in prison at all.

We hope that Trump and Congress will take action to improve prison systems across the entire country the way that Pennsylvania's and Michigan's have improved.

They can do that by giving the FIRST STEP Act's investments in job-readiness programs a boost. Lifting the federal ban on Pell Grants for people in prison would be just the vehicle to do it. Once that barrier falls, we believe the rest will, too, including recidivism.